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Research article2016Peer reviewedOpen access

Ecosystem services from small forest fragments in agricultural landscapes

Decocq, Guillaume; Brunet, Jörg; Wulf, Monika

Abstract

In Europe, like in many temperate lowlands worldwide, forest has a long history of fragmentation and land use change. In many places, forest landscapes consist of patches of different quality, age, size and isolation, embedded in a more or less intensively managed agricultural matrix. As potential biodiversity islets, small forest patches (SFP) may deliver several crucial ecosystem services to human society, but they receive little attention compared to large, relatively intact forest patches. Beyond their role as a biodiversity reservoir, SFP provide important in situ services such as timber and wild food (game, edible plants and mushrooms) production. At the landscape scale, SFP may enhance the crop production via physical (obstacle against wind and floods) and biological (sources of pollinators and natural enemies) regulation, but may, on the other hand, also be involved in the spread of infectious diseases. Depending on their geographic location, SFP can also greatly influence the water cycle and contribute to supply high-quality water to agriculture and people. Globally, SFP are important carbon sinks and are involved in nutrient cycles, thus play a role in climate change mitigation. Cultural services are more related to landscape values than to SFP per se, but the latter may contribute to the construction of community identity. We conclude that SFP, as local biodiversity hotspots in degraded landscapes, have the potential to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services and may even be crucial for the ecological intensification of agroecosystems. There is thus an urgent need to increase our knowledge about the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services delivered by these SFP in agricultural landscapes.

Published in

Current Forestry Reports
2016, Volume: 2, number: 1, pages: 30-44

    Associated SLU-program

    SLU Plant Protection Network

    Sustainable Development Goals

    SDG15 Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
    SDG13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Forest Science
    Ecology
    Environmental Sciences

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40725-016-0028-x

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/79992